Almost all information technology (IT) environments require the presence of management and support applications. Such applications include network and system management functions. Almost all management and support applications require keeping track of the state of the system which is collected at one (or a few) operation centers (e.g., a Network Operation Centers, NoC or Security Operation Center). As the size of IT environments grows, the amount of traffic flowing to and from the operation centers increases. Frequently, this traffic interferes with the operation of the actual IT applications. For instance, a security data collection or a network monitoring system can degrade the performance of a web-site or transaction processing system which may be running at the same operation center or in a different operation center. With virtualized operations, contention can also arise with other resources in the IT infrastructure, such as shared storage, shared computing capacity, or a shared appliance or device that may be accessed in a virtualized manner.
Current solutions to this problem include creating a new network architecture, e.g., use prioritization and differentiated services in the network, or create a separate network infrastructure for management. However, these solutions require changing the operational nature of the network, and frequently are not usable because of the operational challenges they pose.
Therefore improved techniques for reducing interference from management and support applications to functional applications would be desirable.